Showing posts with label attraction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attraction. Show all posts

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Eros In Venus

"Sexual desire without Eros wants the thing in itself." -- The Four Loves,  C.S. Lewis

Venus, the goddess of love in Greek mythology and Eros, god of the same are often bandied about; today science and technology have made us too smart, too slick for something so imprecise as a myth. And yet author C. S. Lewis, most famously wrote about this. Lewis, who is the author of many 20th century works, is best known for Narnia.

About Eros and Venus he writes, Eros without Venus is for lack. Owing to the ancient devotion of the Romans, erotic principle well observed Eros on its own was something altogether different than when enfolded in Venus. As Lewis explains, the 'carnal element within Eros I intend to call Venus.'

"Sexuality,' he adds, ' operates without Eros, or as part of Eros."

It is not necessary to feel anything more than attraction or desire to activate that part of the equation which functions wholly by instinct. And Lewis hastens to add that he writes without moral or other notions, some such as the thought that sex 'with love' is pure while without love it is something else; nor does Lewis seek to describe the activities of Eros 'under a soaring and iridescence which reduces the role of the sense to a minor consideration.'

Eros in Venus is Lewis'; contribution to a description of what the ancients saw as estimable, worthy of a spiritual cause, a religion of degree. This experience he describes as the 'in loveness of the Beloved.' When one first beholds another, it as if he is captured, so captivated may one be by the gazing upon who has inspired this. In a simple, general delight, pre-occupied with all that the one may be, a thirst develops to simply know the creature of ones' gaze, to behold in totality. While in this state one really hasn't the leisure to thing about carnal matters; rather the thought of the person takes precedence. While filled with desire, he may be satisfied to continue in reverie and contemplate this creature whom one may call beloved.

In contemplation, the arrival of Eros, erotic love arrives as if a 'tidal wave, an invader taking over and reorganizing his sensuality. Sexual desire without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros while in Venus wants the Beloved. While one may want a woman not for herself but for the things she may provide, in Eros one wants a particular person--that person for the person them self. This is the Beloved created through some mysterious activity of Eros; in Eros at its most intense, the beloved is needed, craved even for their very self, distinct and unique from all others, admirable in itself. And it's importance is far beyond the lover's need.

While certainly hard to explain, its metaphysical aspects may be explained thus, 'I am in you, you are in me. Your heart is my heart, and my heart is part of your heart alone.' So without Eros, sexual desires, like every other desire is simply about our self. Eros makes it uniquely other focused. Now it's about the Beloved one. The distinction between giving and receiving blurs, indeed it's obliterated when Eros is in Venus.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Spiritual Energy

Love is the great union of the universe."  Theilhard de Chardin

There is no subject in the world which arouses greater curiosity than spiritual, or psychic energy. The energy that animates a body, that enlivens the soul; it lights the eyes and attracts life to itself. Spiritual energy is that which is absent in the corpse. Yet there is scant, scientific evidence that it even exists. Most have an awareness of this energy by their own, daily experience. It is often encountered in the simple, everydayness of life, and as well in the profound.

While science is largely unaware of its presence in the world, its realness, none more opaque scientifically, spawns the whole of Ethics which rests upon it. "The nature of this inner power is so intangible that the whole description of the universe in mechanical terms has had no need to take account... but has deliberate disregard of its reality," wrote Pierre Theilhard de Chardin in his work, The Phenomenon
of Man.
"The difficulties we still encounter in trying to hold together spirit and matter in a reasonable perspective are nowhere more harshly revealed... the building of a bridge between the two banks of our existence-- the physical and the moral-- if we wish the material and spiritual of our activities to be mutually enlivened. To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul in a coherent manner: science has ignored the question... [yet]we must advance."

"The inner face of the world is manifest deep within" and we are most aware of through our concrete behaviors that the two energies do combine, but we cannot easily, or not at all, make out the method. It seems, according to de Chardin, that the method is made of both a dependence and an independence, thus a mutual inter-dependence arises as it occurs to us that the "soul" must be "a focal point of transformation" at which point all energy converges. However attractive it may be to suppose that there is a direct transformation, it becomes clear that in practice, in love, it is their mutual inter-dependence, as clear as their inter-relation arising, says de Chardin writing about the nature of spiritual energy and love.

His book, The Phenomenon of Man, deemed radical when it first appeared in 1940, was blacklisted by many contemporary theologians upon its arrival; today de Chardin now occupies an esteemed place in the world of theology. His ideas give rise to the idea of humanity as a unifying factor of the universe, and man its bearer.